The Blithedale Romance (1852) is the third major romance of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry James called it "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions." In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." The story takes place primarily in the utopian community of Blithedale, presumably in the mid-1800s.